Holiday of a lifetime
“When it’s your own investments, trust is everything.”
Emily was recommended to us by our lawyer in 2012. At that time we were in our mid-50s and thinking about our pensions. We had pots of money in all sorts of places, but we weren’t sure what it all meant – when we could retire, what to do with the pots, what we could afford – we needed someone to help tidy it all up.
Emily did that, and so much more.
What Emily is particularly good at is making us think about what we’ll be doing in 20 years’ time – when we’re not running round and spending as much money, when we won’t have the energy or inclination to climb mountains or go on so many holidays – so she starts to profile your spend to make sure you don’t have any excess left over when it’s too late.
She recently encouraged us to book a cruise round New Zealand and Australia – we wouldn’t have been able to justify that to ourselves. We were going to do it in a campervan! She went through our reasons for not doing it and broke them down one by one and encouraged us to think about things in a different way. From a much wider perspective.
Most advisers are about “Let’s put this in this other fund, and I’ll get this fantastic commission for it.” We never feel this is the driver with Emily. She makes money by doing the right thing for you – we haven’t found anyone else who has done that.
The investment she makes in us is at the front end. In getting to know us and what we’re about. This means that subsequent meetings are about enhancing her understanding of us, which builds on the relationship.
We’ve been through financial advisers who sell you packets off the shelf, so we were very sceptical about them and approached the initial meeting from a negative perspective, so we’ve been on quite a journey.
We now see it as a very long-term commitment and we know if something happened to us and we weren’t around, Emily would sit down with our boys and offer them the same impartial advice and look after them in the same way she has us.
Her technical expertise along the way has also been excellent, but she makes everything easily understandable for us. If we’d met Emily 10 years earlier we would have done a lot better. If we’ve got a regret it’s that we didn’t meet Emily sooner.
